Consider that, today, more than 70% of Americans use social media—up from only 5% tallied in 2005, according to the Pew Research Center. A handful of key players in the space continue to rule. Social Media Examiner's "2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report" revealed that the top platforms used by marketers are Facebook (94%), Twitter (68%), LinkedIn (56%), Instagram (54%), YouTube (45%), Pinterest (30%), and Snapchat (7%). So what's in stor for 2018?

Yahoo! Buys Tumblr for $1.1 Billion

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Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer is making news again: this time with the $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr. All Things D, among a bevy of other publications, reported late last week that anonymous sources said Mayer had met with Tumblr CEO David Karp and was interested in bringing the popular blogging service into the Yahoo! fold. Then, Monday morning the companies announced the deal was final via a press release. According to the press release:

"Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators."

It is widely speculated that Mayer is interested in Tumblr's large, youthful audience, but despite the blogging platform's popularity - and recent fundraising success - it has yet to find a monetization strategy. Relying on user-generated content, and initially resisting advertizing, Tumblr has recently started selling native ads.

According to the press release, "With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of the fastest-growing media networks in the world. Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent on site each month. On mobile, more than half of Tumblr's users are using the mobile app and do an average of 7 sessions per day. Its tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network. The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! is expected to grow Yahoo!'s audience by 50 percent to more than a billion monthly visitors, and to grow traffic by approximately 20 percent."